Levelling the Mirabel airport: Wrecking balls to raze monument to heartless government planning

When Mirabel airport opened in 1975, Rubin Ginzburg was the manager, and he thought he had a success on his hands with the modern glass terminal and buses that ferried passengers to their aircraft.

“It was a nice terminal. It actually won a prize for its design. It was built with the idea of giving service to passengers who didn’t have to walk a hell of a lot,” Mr. Ginzburg, 84, said Thursday from his home in Mirabel.

“From the parking lot to the aircraft, it was a walk of about 200 feet. It was nothing.”

But travelling between the terminal, about 55 kilometres northwest of downtown Montreal, and the city was another matter, especially after planned highway and rail links were never built. When an expected boom in air traffic failed to materialize, the $1-billion airport became known as Canada’s most blindingly white elephant.

Mr. Ginzburg, who retired from Mirabel in 1994, still questions choices made by the airport administration to transfer flights to Dorval, Montreal’s other airport, but he recognizes the decision, announced Thursday, to demolish the terminal is the right one.

The last passenger flight touched down in 2004 and efforts to find investors to take over the one-million-square-foot building came up empty. A far-fetched project announced in 2006 to turn the terminal into an aquatic theme park failed when the promoters could not raise financing.

Aéroports de Montréal, the non-profit authority responsible for Mirabel and Trudeau International Airport in Dorval, says it has spent $30-million over the last 10 years on upkeep of a deserted terminal. An additional $25-million in repairs are required in the short term.

Basically they threw away $30-million

“There’s nothing you can do with the terminal. It was built for an airport,” Mr. Ginzburg said. “You can’t make anything out of it. Basically they threw away $30-million.”

Gérard Beaudet, a professor of urban studies at the Université de Montréal, said the airport was doomed almost from the day it opened.

The Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau chose the location against the wishes of the province, which had lobbied for a site south of the St. Lawrence River. Quebec, in turn, refused to complete the road and air links that might have made Mirabel viable.

“So, from the beginning, it was an airport that was very badly serviced both by car as well as by public transit,” Mr. Beaudet said. Add to that the transformation of aviation technology, which made it easier for flights from Europe to go directly to Toronto.

“It was conceived at the end of the 1960s, built in the early 1970s, and almost right from the get-go, there was a great deal of opposition,” said James Cherry, president of Aéroports de Montréal.

“A good number of people said this was badly timed, responding to something that never happened: an exponential growth in traffic, everyone flying around in supersonic transport.”

The airport authority has issued a call for tenders for the demolition, which Mr. Cherry said will be complicated by asbestos throughout the terminal. He hopes work could begin this fall.

Mr. Beaudet said when the wrecking balls swing, they will level a monument to heartless government planning. Nearly 46,000 hectares of land were expropriated to create an unnecessarily huge buffer zone around the airport, displacing 3,200 property owners. Mr. Beaudet said abandoned homes were deliberately torched to train firefighters.

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“It’s really a reminder of the cold, technocratic planning that was the norm at the time,” he said. “Today, things are done differently.”

Mirabel Mayor Jean Bouchard is not so sure. He said his town would have appreciated more time to find a use for the terminal that could boost the economy and the municipal tax base. He knows commercial flights will never return, but lately he has been pitching the idea of an annual aerospace exhibition like the ones in Farnborough, Britain, and Le Bourget, France.

“The building is still solid,” he said. “By demolishing it, it really concludes what was a total disaster from start to finish in this story.”

Mr. Cherry points out while passengers no longer land in Mirabel, the airport has become a hub for the aviation industry and cargo traffic, with such companies as Bombardier and Pratt &amp; Whitney employing 3,700 people and creating $1.1-billion in annual economic activity.

Rather than consecrating a disaster, he prefers to look at the demolition as turning the page.

“I understand the sentimentality,” he said. “I know there are people who are still smarting over the original expropriation, and I understand. But I don’t think that the fact an error was made 40 years ago, justifies us maintaining the error and maintaining a symbol at an exorbitant cost every year.”